by Adam Hall
‘Of course.’ Tone icy.
‘So what I’ve got to do is destroy the objective, Shoda, without killing her. The mission you’re running is aimed at the destruction of the Shoda organisation and I’m the executive in the field’ - began walking around again - ‘and we’ve got our faces shoved right up against the end-phase and we haven’t got a bloody clue as to how we’re going to bring this thing off.’
In a minute Pepperidge said very quietly, ‘I rather think you have, old boy.’
‘What?’ I swung round. ‘Possibly. A very small one. I’m just thinking aloud, trying to get feedback.’
I went across and poured some more coffee and put it down again without drinking any because we were in the extreme end-phase of the mission and I was on a collision course with a woman who’d got a small army out there waiting for me and I didn’t want to be caught at the wrong end of a caffeine curve; that sort of thing can kill you.
‘Another thing’ - and I was, yes, thinking aloud but that was good - ‘is that I can’t confront Shoda without getting her isolated somehow.’ And I knew when I said it that it was a key word, isolated, though I didn’t know why. ‘I don’t mean separated from her bodyguards, I couldn’t hope for that. I think I mean away from the public somewhere, in case people get hurt. It’s not going to be a tea-party.’
Long silence, but this time useful, potentially constructive, so forth. And something had got through.
I ‘Isolated,’ Pepperidge said. He got off the couch and stood with his hands shoved into his pockets, looking through the wall. ‘Not in her house.’
‘No. I’d never get in there alive.’
Loman was staring into the middle distance too but he didn’t say anything for a minute, couldn’t hit on anything. Then he turned and started walking again and said, ‘We’ve got the full cooperation of the Singapore police, but there’s nothing they can do against Shoda. She’s politically untouchable. Diplomatically. She could bring almost any democratic government down in Asia simply by hitting its economy or exposing any one of the half-dozen corrupt officials in high places.’ He gave me a direct look. ‘We can’t help you there.’
‘I understand that.’
In any case I couldn’t see us going into the end-phase with any kind of police action. They couldn’t touch Shoda. The government couldn’t touch her. It wasn’t a question of an operation; it was a question of infiltration, very focused, very specific, just one man going in.
‘Would anyone like some lunch?’
Katie.
Loman stopped pacing as if he’d hit a wall and stared at her as if he didn’t understand the word. Perhaps she should have said luncheon.
‘Good thinking.’ Pepperidge.
‘Some kind of protein?’ I said.
She passed close to me on her way out, saying softly, ‘and a little zabaglione?’ And left her scent on the air, my God, there’s nothing like a woman’s presence to bring the tension down, she doesn’t even have to touch you.
‘Look,’ Pepperidge said, and didn’t finish it because Flood came through the doors just then and told Loman there was a call from one of the contacts in Cambodia and Loman went out to take it and from that minute the final action of the end-phase started running and we were pitched into it headlong.
CHAPTER 30
MR. CRODER
‘Where ?’ Loman asked them.
We were in the smoking-room off the main salon, reproduction antique brass telephone and plush armchairs and gilt ashtrays and a thin Chinese nude on the wall with exaggerated nipples.
‘When?’
Loman looked very calm. One of the things I dislike least about him is that when a mission’s in a slow phase he’s like a fart in a collander and he can drive you stark raving mad but when it swings into momentum again he quietens down and starts running like a well-oiled dynamo. Flood had told him the signal was from our second unit in Cambodia.
‘What time tomorrow?’
Pepperidge was hitched on a bar stool, his yellow eyes deceptively sleepy. Flood was standing under a lamp, plaster cherub holding the shade aloft. Flood behaved like a subordinate and called me sir but that was just because he was a bit younger and he probably found the presence of a top control from London intimidating. But I knew who he was now.
I’d asked Pepperidge a bit earlier, ‘Is this man Flood my replacement?’
Pepperidge had looked away, looked back again. ‘Yes, old boy. But he’ll never get the job, of course.’
It didn’t actually bother me. In fact there was a certain comfort in the knowledge that if I got things wrong in the next few hours and bought the Elysian fields thing at least I’d know they’d got someone standing by to take over.
‘Wait a minute,’ Loman said, and blocked the mouthpiece I and looked at Pepperidge and me and said briefly, ‘They’ve traced the consignment. It’s on its way to Prey Veng by air.’
‘Where’s that?’ Pepperidge asked him.
‘Across the Mekong from Phnom Penh.’ He looked at me now, waiting. Half the component of the mission was in place and I was the second half and he wanted to know if I had any questions. I did. This was a breakthrough.
‘Can they open the crates and switch the contents?’
‘Can they what?’
‘Permission to talk to them.’ Strictly formal, right out of the book, because he was a control and the final decision-making was going to be his or Croder’s but I’d got the whole thing in my head now, the end-phase, ready to run, and the timing was so critical that we’d have to work by the minute all the way down to zero and that was why I was being formal with Loman because I didn’t want to get his back up and put everything in hazard, not now.
He hesitated, then passed me the phone.
‘Executive.’
‘Salutations.’
My opposite number.
‘Listen, this is fully urgent. Can you switch the contents of those crates and let them go through on schedule?’
Short silence. I hadn’t made their end-phase any easier.
‘You mean shove some pig-iron in them, or something?’
‘Yes, whatever you can find. We want them to arrive at their projected destination and ETA as if they’d never been touched. That possible?’
Another silence, then, ‘Like fucking things up, don’t you?’
Meant yes.
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind working with you again.’ He’d got us this end of the mission.
‘That’s not mutual,’ he said, ‘because you’ve gone and pissed on the chips, but I suppose that’s life.’ His tone changed. ‘All right, you want everything left intact, shipping labels, manifest, routing, the whole thing. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And once the crates are there, our end’s in the bag and we’re completed, that right?’
‘Except for getting the Slingshots to the Thai army.’
‘Oh yes, we shan’t be leaving those things around for the kids to play with in the park, don’t worry. Look, can I have confirmation from your control?’
‘Hold on.’ I turned to Loman. ‘You heard what I’ve asked them to do and they say they can do it and I’ve worked out our end-phase and it’ll give us the only chance we’ve got, so are you prepared to give me full discretion over this?’
He stood there staring at me with his hands behind him and his feet together and his head on the tilt and I watched him computerising the whole situation including what would happen to him in London if it turned out that he’d let me screw up the mission and drive it into the ground.
Pepperidge had taken a step closer and he was watching me too, his eyes blanked off and his mouth a tight line because he’d catch some of the flak if he let his executive talk his control into a last-ditch spectacular fiasco.
Then Loman made a curt gesture and I gave him the phone and he said, ‘Control. I am placing the completion of your operation into the hands of the executive here.’
Gave me the phone back
.
‘Thank you, sir.’
More than I’d asked for, more than I could have expected, much more - he was giving me immediate responsibility for the whole show.
I said into the phone, ‘What’s the ETA for that consignment in Prey Veng?’
‘21:14 today.’
‘Where are you going to make the switch?’
‘In Phnom Penh.’
‘At the airport?’
‘Yes, in a holding warehouse.’
‘Clandestine?’
‘We’ve bought two customs people.’
‘Not a lot of risk, then.’
‘Not a lot. I’d say we’ve got, you know, around ninety per cent in our favour.’
I whipped through the main essentials to see if I were missing anything, didn’t think I was.
‘How long is it going to take them to unload the consignment and check on the contents, open up a crate?’
‘I can’t say, sir. I mean, it’s up to them. But it wouldn’t take more than a half hour to get the stuff off the kite and then all they’ll need is a crowbar.’
So I’d be working inside a time bracket of thirty minutes minimum. But then they’d go through all the crates before they contacted Shoda.
‘How many crates are there?’
‘Twenty.’
Think. How long would it take to open up twenty crates and go through the whole contents, which was what they’d do before they got on the radio and informed Shoda? An hour. Say an hour. Time bracket, then, of ninety minutes minus an estimated - I looked at Pepperidge - ‘From here to the airport, how long?’
‘Forty minutes, with the escort.’
Minus an estimated forty minutes and another forty-five minutes for the Shoda jet to start up and taxi and get to the grid. Bracket of five minutes. Five.
Better than zero and I was having to make estimates and I might have longer than that and we still had a chance even if it were shorter below zero. So take the risk, go for it.
‘All right,’ I said into the phone, ‘set it up. Any questions?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then keep in signals.’
‘Roger.’
I put the phone down and went into the little lav just off the smoking-room and slurped some handfuls of water into my mouth and splashed my face and towelled it and went back and through into the salon and told Loman and Pepperidge what I wanted to do.
‘She kill my father.’
There was a moth circling the lamp. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
Thank me… Mother of God, if I hadn’t gone there to the radio station she wouldn’t have sent the bombers in.
Bitch!
‘You know he then?’
‘Yes, Sayako-san.’
Moth round the lamp bulb, bumping into it, a powdering of gold dust coming down.
‘Kishnar,’ she said. ‘What happen?’
‘We sent him to Shoda, in a coffin.’
I heard her catch her breath. ‘You do such a thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will make her afraid.’ Silence came in and I waited. Gold dust floating down, are you out of your bloody mind, have you got to go on hitting the bloody thing?
Couldn’t stay away, I suppose. Don’t take this all the way to the brink.
‘I live only now,’ the soft voice came, ‘till she the.’ Meant, for her to the.
‘I understand.’
‘She very strong. Very hard. But like glass, one day break easily. You make her break, I think, one day.’
‘Perhaps.’
I’d been wondering why she’d phoned but now I knew. More than anything in the world she wanted Shoda’s death, and she thought I might bring it about for her. She’d wanted to talk to the instrument of her heart’s most bitter craving.
‘Will be graceful,’ she said. I think she meant that to kill Mariko Shoda would bring grace upon me.
‘If it happens, Sayako-san, you will know.’
‘Yes.’ Another silence, but for the soft sounds of her crying. ‘When she the, my father be at peace.’
I said something consoling, I don’t quite remember what, and then there was a click on the line and it went dead and I suppose she’d just felt she couldn’t talk anymore.
I went back into the salon and we took up where we’d left off.
‘I don’t like your extemporising?
Loman.
‘It’s the only way.’
‘But surely the risk is high.’
‘
‘Not so high as if we just wait around till they locate me and wipe me out.’
Pepperidge was perched on the edge of a chair and hadn’t said anything for a long time. I don’t think he liked it. Flood was standing near the stained-glass windows with his feet apart and his arms folded, listening hard but not saying anything either. Katie was manning the phone whenever it rang, coming back to sit apart from us, her face strained. I wished she didn’t have to be here with us but it was up to Loman.
Loman hadn’t answered so I said it again, trying to sell it to him. ‘This is the only way.’
I’d told them what I wanted to do and how it would have to be handled technically and I’d told Flood to get me what I needed and he’d done that and all we had to do now was wait for our contacts to ring us when Shoda left the house in Saiboo Street for the airport, and that would be when she got the news from Prey Veng that the consignment had arrived there.
Loman still didn’t answer. I think he was simply stonewalling so that I’d have to keep on pushing him, and then if I said something wrong he could pounce on it. That was all right; that was his job. So I went on pushing.
‘I know two things. When she moves, I’ve got to move, or I’ll lose her. And we’ve got to isolate the confrontation, to keep the public out of danger.’
Loman was still silent. He didn’t like this, any more than Pepperidge. A bit earlier Pepperidge had said to me quietly, hand on my arm, ‘You really are taking this all the way to the brink this time.’ Told him there wasn’t anywhere else left for me to go.
Then Loman spoke.
‘Very well.’ He was sitting in the wing-chair with his hands along its arms and his polished shoes together, staring down at them. ‘But, of course, I have serious reservations.’ He swung his small head up and stared at me instead of his shoes and I knew what was on his mind: he could be looking at someone who’d started dying.
‘If you can’t give me a decision,’ I told him, ‘very fast indeed, I’d say we’ve had it. The Slingshot’s out of her hands now but she’s still alive and she’s the target. You can’t hope to go on protecting me even with half the Singapore police force because I’ve got to move into the open for the end-phase whatever form it takes and they’ll simply pick me off with a telescopic rifle if they can’t get any closer.’
This situation hadn’t happened before: the executive, at present safe and supported by his director in the field and his London control, had a limited life span, and during that span he’d got to complete the mission.
‘We are working on assumptions,’ Loman said. ‘We assume that when Shoda is told that the consignment has been landed she’ll leave the house in Saiboo Street for the airport and take off for Prey Veng, confident that you’ll be taken care of in her absence by her hit teams.’
‘It’s logical,’ I told him. ‘We’re not taking wild swipes.’
‘I agree. But you’ve narrowed down the time element to as little as five minutes.’
‘The time gap’s important but it’s not critical. If she gets the news that she’s lost the Slingshot before I can break it to her, we’ve still got a chance.’
He didn’t answer.
There was the rustling of paper and I saw Katie clearing away the debris from the sandwiches she’d brought in for us. Flood went across to help her. He looked as if he hadn’t been listening to anything but, of course, he had. He needed to know what kind of mess I might be leaving him to st
raighten out.
‘How do you rate your chances, Quiller?’
Loman was still staring at me with his pale glass eyes.
‘Look, if I start thinking in terms of life-and-death percentages it’s going to sabotage my confidence. The thing is this. We’ve still got a mission running and the only way I can finish it is to get close to Shoda and this is the last chance we’ve got.’
Waited again.
I hate waiting.
The air was still like steam in here because they’d let the whole place run down and there wasn’t any air-conditioning but there was a chill creeping through me as if winter had come.
They ‘re right. You shouldn’t take the risk.
Now don’t you start.
End-phase nerves. Normal, ignore.
You do in fact know what your chances are.
Shuddup and fuck off.
Then Loman said, ‘I think this is for Mr. Croder to decide.’
‘If it doesn’t take all day to get him.’
‘He is near the signals console at all times.’ Loman got up and gave his shoes another scrutiny. ‘Will you talk to him or shall I?’
I thought that was nice of him. A top control in the field from London doesn’t normally leave it to the ferret to contact the C of C and take part in the decision-making.
‘Let me phone him right away,’ I told him, and the feeling I had when I made my way round the chairs and tables and into the smoking-room was split right down the middle between total assurance that I could pull off a five-star spectacular and a numbing certainty that this was the day when I was going to the brink for the last time, and right over.
I asked for C of C.
‘Yes?’
‘Red Lotus, executive.’
I told him what I’d got in mind and he asked me to repeat it and I did that.
He said no.
‘Sir, let me put it this way. If I come unstuck, you’re not going to lose the mission, just the executive. My replacement’s fully briefed and ready to take over.’